Why has Anthony Albanese failed to condemn blatant police brutality against passionate demonstrators demanding the right to continue a long running campaign of protests for a free Palestine during the presence in Australia of Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
Michael West reports at https://michaelwest.com.au/chaos-at-herzog-protest-as-police-use-excessive-force-the-west-report/ about Monday’s protest in Sydney:
“…. a very heavy police operation, which saw protesters pepper sprayed, brutalised, pushed to the ground and arrested. This included elderly people, families, people with disability and all of this was captured on video for the world to see …….
Critics say the response was not spontaneous but planned …….
We now hear ….. Zack Scholfield:
‘……. Clearly the police had decided that they were going to kettle and entrap those thousands upon thousands of people, not let them leave the square …… and at a certain point police simply started charging into the crowd with horses, pepper spray, picking people off the margins and beating them behind police lines.
…….I saw elderly people ….. get charged directly by these riot cops ……. If they fell over in the scuffle, or got pushed over, which regularly happened, they were trampled by police and then sometimes beaten when they couldn’t get up or when they tried to get up …….
The police response was clearly designed to incite people to fight back …….
Many of your viewers would have seen the footage of police pushing over kicking punching people at prayer that were kneeling on the ground face down or police punching people in the head that were already on the ground in handcuffs ……
I looked into the eyes of these riot police that were on the front lines and many of them were clearly enjoying the position of power that they had been given by the government and many of them were clearly enjoying the fact that they had people that they could brutalis ….. without fear of retaliation because of their overwhelming numbers.’ “
Geoff Fox, February 12, 2026, Australia
LEFT BEHIND BY ALBANESE 